How one city grew & another decayed
Reviews by Randeep Wadhera

• The City of Hope by LC Jain. Concept Publishing, New Delhi. Pages 330. Rs 400.
• Delhi is Decaying by AR Wig. Ajanta Books, Delhi. Pages xix+334. Rs 325.
• Negotiation and Social Space by Carla Risseeuw. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pages 353. Rs 450.
• Missionary Conspiracy: Letters to a Postmodern Hindu by Vishal Mangal-wadi.Good Books, Mus-soorie. Pages 552. Rs 225.

Endless clash of the old & the new
Review by D.R. Chanudhry
South Asia — Democracy, Discontent and Social Conflict edited by Gopal Singh. Anamik Publishers, Delhi. Pages 492. Rs 800.

Post-modernism: a fact there, a fad here

POST-MODERNISM is a condition in the West, but at best an academic fad in our part of the world. Many books including Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition” have analysed the symptoms that cumulatively add up to what is called the post-modern syndrome.

Its manifestations include the abdication of cognition and immediacy in the use of language, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most anonymous and banal formalism, in the dilution of meanings, in the blunting of individual expressiveness and, above all, in the installation of populist mediocrity in all spheres of social and cultural life.

Though a term with a long history, it has come to be associated with anti-traditionalism, anit-foundationalism, as also with whatever is contingent, subversive and merely functional. For David Harvey, Daniel Bell, Gianni Vattimo and other theorists of the post-modern, the term stands for the “abandonment of historical continuity, and memory” (Harvey), the exhaustion of modernism through “the rebelliousness of ... cultural mass” (Bell), and in the development of “media which give local or minority cultures a voice... the disappearance of universalism” (Vattimo). These are only partial listings of post-modernism’s attributes, but represent its most salient descriptions.

Though in the West post-modernism is now an intellectual fashion, it has respectable philosophical antecedents: it constitutes a destructive critique of instrumental rationality initiated by Marx, Freud and Nietzsche — a critique that shows up post-modernism’s incompatability with the Enlightenment ideas of continuity and belief in the Subject, the Individual I.

In cultural matters post-modernists reject the hierarchy of forms and values, and laud the self-indulging stylisation of much contemporary mass entertainment. Against the highmindedness of the modernist aesthetic belief in the consoling power of art and in the art object as a buffer against the harsh reality “out there”, post-modernists decentre the ambitiousness of the modernist enterprise by breaking down cultural barriers and deferring judgments of value. They display an ambient coolness which comes from consumerism as a great leveller.

If everything has value, then nothing has value — a tenet very dear to contemporary mass culture. Post-modernism is a revenge of mass culture on those who take it seriously. Hence the tawdriness of its cultural wares, from the dreck-like exhibits of Andy Warhol to the mock-effervescence of Salman Rushdie’s prose style.

One of the latest post-modern tendencies is towards what Paul Virilio calls “teletransmission” (“The Open Sky”) as it replaces physical contact and communication by other means. As electronic networks replace slower means of communication and contact, the world comes closer and becomes more democratic. Marshall Mcluhan had foreseen as much, but Virilio offers a recycled version of Macluhan’s global village theory by suggesting that western technology is drifting in an electronic ether towards an “automation of perception”.

In the so-called developed world there is now a pervasive sense of the flattening out of hierarchies of contact, as this world moves from local identities, small ethnic, religious and political allegiances on to a wired up system of an “omnipolitan cyberspace”.

This is paradoxical situation and the paradox is the keenest today; the local, the specific and the contingent (post-modernist thinkers’s small narratives) driven towards a new globalism through the imperatives of information technology. In practice the local and the specific have garnered the benefits of the global technology to pursue their narrow agendas.

No amount of video-linking can do away with what is tangible and concrete in human experience. Though post-modernism has discredited the I, the latter returns in various guises to cock a snook at theory. It returns to haunt the post-modernist claims of “end of history” and “vanishing of the beyond”. It returns as the hard rock of reality to cast a long shadow on the vain assertion of filleting of all experience into a homogeneous mix.

There is strange ambiguity about the word “post” and this ambiguity is played out in almost all post-modern discourses. The “post” denotes a break with what is termed as high modernism. It challenges the modernist assumptions of depth and sets up surface as the norm. It substitutes literature with “texts” and since post-modernism is the current zeitgeist in the West, everything else is a text and a discourse, a breach separating its intention and effect.

The post-modern slogan from Ihab Hassan (an early taxonomist) to the present day is: Forget depth and absolute values. Cultivate surface, relativism and ever-changing performative styles.

I see Fredric Jameson’s contribution to the post-modernism debate from two related angles. A contemporary of Bell, Harvey, Kellner and others, he remains its only comprehensive cartographer, who charts its evolution through pre-modern, modern and later phases. In other words, he provides a history of the post-modern, not only as a cultural phenomenon but also as a distinctive style of performance, a style that made Richard Poirier call the subject of much contemporary literature a performing self.

Ironically, Jameson exposes a major flaw in the post-modern claims of the “end of history” by tracing post-modernism, itself along a historical trajectory. He keeps true to his contention in an early essay that by “historicizing” alone can social and intellectual currents be placed in perspective. Jameson’s Marxism leads him to provide a materialist grounding for his concept, further enabling him to detail its forms in the culture of the image, fragmentation, pastische and schizophrenia (pastische being a special defining feature of the post-modern, as mentioned in the essay “Transformation of the image in post-modernity”).

Post-modernism for Jameson is primarily a cultural shift in the socio-economic paradigm which includes a conscious overlap between high and low cultures and turns culture itself into a commodity. It replicates the explanations of Lyotard (about images and fragmentation) and Deleuze and Guattari (about the schizophrenic individuality under capitalism).

He shares with them the conviction that post-modern culture has become apolitical and has lost its radical otherness, its capacity to call its own premises into question. And yet he does not share their rejection of the past. Here he is closer to Foucault in that he maintains a sense of historical continuity. Besides, unlike the others, he grounds his assumptions on a bedrock of Marxist utopianism and a belief in the struggle for human emancipation and alternative social polity.

Where, then, does Jameson’s singularity as a critic and cartographer of post-modernism lie? This brings me to my second angle on his theory: he is the first cultural critic to relate post-modernism to the varying phases of capitalist development. Here again his Marxist instincts direct him to trace the stages through which capitalism evolves and through which its cultural contradictions emerge. Jameson’s analysis of this evolution is amply presented in the seminal work “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” but many essays in the present volume also draw attention to the parallelism between late capitalism and post-modern cultural practices.

On this analysis post-modernism belongs to that phase of late capitalism where capital is “deterritorialized”, that is where capital flows freely between societies without national constraints. This is how he perceives globalisation: When capital shifts to other and more profitable forms of production, often enough in new geographical regions... Globalisation is rather a kind of cyber-space in which capital has reached its ultimate dematerialisation, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world (“Culture and Finance Capital”).

The emphasis on the disappearance of the “former globe” and “the former material world” tunes in with what theorists have said about teletransmission replacing other modes of communication. Basing his entire analogy on Ernest Mandel’s “Late Capitalism” (1975), a work Jameson comes to depend upon increasingly, he manages to provide a road map on which cultural forms pass through pre-modern (peasant societies), modern (bourgeois societies) on to the current post-modern stage (the society of the spectacle, a phrase made famous by Guy Debord).

As Jameson says in the first essay of the present collection, “Post-modernism and consumer society”, “Radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content, but rather a restructuring of certain elements already given: features that in an earlier period... were subordinate now become dominant, and features that have been dominant again become secondary. This is a statement that should halt newly converted apologists for everything post-modern in their tracks and should recall to them what Raymod Williams had anticipated nearly 30 years ago — namely, the uneven development of socio-cultural tendencies in every historical epoch.

Jameson believes (and is fortified by his current expositor, Perry Anderson in “Origins of Post-modernity”) that post-modernism is both a continuation of and a degeneration from the high modernist features of contemporary capitalism. What distinguishes the epoch is that here “every sphere of culture is being coterminous with market society resulting in the penetration into everyday life of the images of high culture and vice versa.

But this development must not be confused with the popular cutural bases of ‘say’ Shakespeare, Dickens or Joyce. It is a form of colonisation of cultural space by mixed-media experiments with high-tech hybrids of all kinds. It is cultural formaldehyde in which diverse form of art and economy are trapped in a way that seems inevitable — at any rate to the celebrants of post-modernity as liberation. “Colonisation” is Jameson’s word and warns us against the Macluhanite vision of culture transformed by technology.

“Colonisation” also elaborates the spatial aspect of post-modernism that Jameson dwells on in several essays of the present collection. In his frequent references to architecture, particularly in the first and last essay of the present collection, he is at pains to point out that post-modernism represents a substantial decline in our sense of time and history and, as a consequence, in the accentuation of deathlessness. It leads to a spatial disorientation in relation to the global reach of late capitalism. This phenomenon he explains with particular reference to spatial arts like film, video and sculpture.

Space has usurped narrative arts’s domain and in architecture replaced depth with surface formalism. Though Jameson does not offer any convincing argument for what Harvey calls his “space-fetishism”, he does seem to lose interest in narrative `arts to the point that they hardly figure in his later writings. Much of the time he talks about films and video, particularty in his two books on film. It is only this year that he has chosen to write on Brecht (“Brecht & Method”)

Several essays in the present collection as well as another important essay “Congnitive Mapping” in Cary Nelson’s collection look at space as standardisation of life experiences. But Jameson does not accept this as an ultimate fact but as a proximate possibility. Part of the reason is that though he reads the post-modern condition in the West more completely than others, he remains committed to a foundational perspective he terms “totality”. Even as he deplores the fact that “post-modern spatiality has located itself in an unmappable world”, he also feels the need for a conception of “a dominant cultural logic” to evaluate and judge various formations of the post-modern.

This logic is provided by Jameson’s Marxist utopianism. In the essay “Antinomies of post modernity” extracted from his later book “Seeds of Time”, he offers utopianism as a possible way of resisting the post-modern. Utopianism is the bedrock connecting him, on the one hand, to the grand narrative of Marxism, and the need for resistance on the other. But forms of resistance do not acquire any concrete shape in his programme, for the simple reason that he is too preoccupied in charting the contours of the post-modern to turn serious attention to various forms of resistance, particularly in non-western societies.

For one thing, these societies still partake of the mythical mind. Since the penetration of the post-modern trends is quite slow in these societies, they retain a core of resistance drawing upon pre-modern forms of revolt. If the post-modern demythifies life, then such a thing has not so for come to pass in our societies. Myths continue to provide the source language not only for our ethical lives, but also in our mass entertainment such as teleserials and Bollywood films. Our non-westernised masses continue to use traditional modes of resistance to the culture engendered on a minuscule scale on our elite channels of news and information.

This is why I would like to repeat what I said in the beginning. Since we have yet to fulfil the conditions for full domination by it, post-modernism remains only an intellectual classroom exercise, telling us nothing about ourselves. Connonades against the canon have very feeble sound hereabouts.

Journalism then (idealism)and now (opportunism)

THE good news about this book is it tells you what journalism was; the bad news is what journalism is. From a mission it has become a profession like soap manufacture. That irritates the author no end.

Chronicling the rise and fall of the editors he worked with in The Indian Express, The Pioneer, National Herald and The Hindustan Times, P.Tharyan concludes: “The era of the great Editors has ended. We live in the age of pygmies.”

Bashing up the boss may not be an ideal post-retirement pastime and some may dispute his assessment of the editors, but Tharyan, who retired as senior assistant editor from The Hindustan Times and died last year, is entitled to his views.

His bare-all approach, as bold as Khushwant Singh’s or Shobha De’s is in matters of sex, does not appear to be born out of bitterness or professional failure.

Not many journalists bother to write honestly about what happens inside newspaper offices with the result students of journalism, fed largely on British and American media books, tend to nurse misplaced notions about the job of a journalist and the role of the Press. They regret it later. For those students this book is a boon.

Journalists who love to see their boss’s pants pulled down in public, will grab this book for Press Club gossip. The general reader may enlighten himself about games editors play to first secure and then retain their job, and about illicit relationship between newspaper managements and politicians in power.

There may not be two opinions about Tharyan’s list of the greats —M. Chalapathi Rau, S.N Ghosh, S. Mulgaokar, B.G Verghese, Khushwant Singh and Prem Shankar Jha are all respectable names in journalism. But it is unfair to dismiss the whole lot of present-day editors as pygmies.

Giants too had their weaknesses. MC, as Chalapathi Rau was famously known, was blind to Nehru’s shortcomings, praised Indira Gandhi during the Emergency and thought he was the National Herald. S.N Ghosh, who was the editor of The Pioneer for four decades, plagiarised from The Economist, New Stateman and The Times, London, and served the interests of the proprietors.

Mulgaokar played Ramnath Goenka’s game. B.G Verghese got and lost his Hindustan Times editorship because of Indira Gandhi. Khushwant Singh’s proximity to Sanjay Gandhi earned him the editorship of first National Herald and then The Hindustan Times.

Most editors in the past excelled in writing and thought their editorials or columns alone interested the reader. As a result, they neglected news coverage, and newspapers looked dull. Today newspapers are bigger and brighter with a broader reach, despite competition from the electronic media.

Financial demands on newspapers have multiplied with new technology requiring a large investment and the wage bill is ballooning. To survive and stay ahead in a competitive world, newspapers get desperate to increase circulation and advertisement revenue, resort to marketing strategies, including price cuts. This calls for increased managerial responsibilities which cast its shadow on the editor’s domain.

Writes Tharyan:“....any HT (Hindustan Times) Editor in recent years would have been fooling himself had he tried to establish that he had enjoyed absolute independence in edit writing or news coverage.”

The Times of India has abolished the post of editor and marketing boys run the newspaper, and not without success. Pothan Joseph once wrote: “It is very difficult to build up a newspaper. Once it is built, you can fill it with rubbish and it will sell.”

That newspapers run by business houses and political parties have their holy cows, more than others, is all too well known, but competition and clash of interests ensure that if one newspaper tries to suppress certain news or gives a distorted version, the rival exposes it. Thus recently when The Times of India unleashed a campaign against Enforcement Directorate officials investigating charges against Ashok Jain, The Stateman came to their rescue and launched a counter-campaign. Today the reader is alert enough to realise when his newspaper stinks and he can say no to rubbish.

As every starlet in Bollywood realises, it is for her to decide whether to adopt the hard way of struggle to stay in the profession or resort to the easier way of sleeping around, and editor too knows he can’t be forced to part with virtue. Tharyan contends that because of a fat salary and huge perks and privileges, an editor today tends to discard his chastity belt more easily than his predecessor when faced with a threat to his job.

Well, I am too small a fry to comment on that and leave it to editors to ponder over. What I can whole-heartedly support—with first hand experience behind it —is the author’s observation: “Hard work has little to do with success, specially in journalism. Most of those who have come up in the profession are laggards of the worst order.”

How one city grew & another decayed

EVERY time one assumes that the last word on events circa 1947 has been said, the last photograph published or the last dramatised or filmed version presented, something new comes up. New, both as a narrative style and as an expose on some aspect of human affairs that was somehow overlooked earlier. Among the millions who crossed over from Pakistan in 1947, about 50,000 refugees reached Faridabad. Political and administrative apathy marred their rehabilitation. How the human spirit triumphs over such odds is underscored in this narrative.

The author, a 1989 winner of the Magsaysay award for public service, was quite active during the days of freedom struggle. He gave up his studies to serve the uprooted humanity. One of the founders and general secretary of the Indian Cooperative Union led by Kamala Devi Chattopadhyaya, Jain narrates the events that led to Nehru acknowledging the Faridabad refugee resettlement project as a laboratory to test his plans to build a modern India.

However bureaucracy saw to it that the cooperative efforts to evolve an egalitarian set-up in the fledgling industrial township were somehow scuttled. The Rehabilitation Ministry withdrew support to the inhabitants of the resettlement camp. As usual, the babus won.

Serious differences developed between Nehru and Patel on the resettling of Meos who had migrated to Pakistan but soon returned to their ancestral villages only to find that their properties were taken over by Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan. The book is rich with similar historical tidbits that are usually ignored by serious historians. The correspondence between Rajendra Prasad, Nehru, Patel and other stalwarts has been copiously quoted to give the uninitiated some idea of the conditions prevailing then in the higher echelons of administration.

Today, Faridabad is a bustling industrial township. Proximity to the National Capital has given it certain advantages. Yet one feels slight discomfort while describing the township as “The City of Hope”. The disintegrating administration, the rise of the mafia and the spiralling crime send a chill down one’s spine whenever Faridabad is mentioned. Perhaps the author is an incorrigible optimist. I hope his optimism wins.

*****

That our National Capital, of which Faridabad is a mere suburb, is becoming a crime capital is no secret. Hardly a day passes when one does not hear of an infraction more gory and shocking than the previous one. Neither the victim, nor the perpetrator belongs to the “lower” sections of society. Well-bred criminals have taken over the Capital now.

Wig, a senior journalist with The Hindustan Times, has used his professional expertise to investigate the grim state of affairs. He narrates the city’s history since the Mughal days. He deals with the various symptoms of decay — pollution, crime, administrative apathy, etc.

He also touches on the subject of those from the then terrorism-stricken Punjab trying to seek shelter in Delhi. No doubt the state as well as the Centre have largely ignored the plight of the victims of Punjab terrorism. The kin of the victims of terrorism lead a pathetic life and have harrowing tales to tell.

Along with this the author should have dealt with the Delhi riots too. This would have placed several controversies in perspective. All said and done, this book is a valuable addition to your collection. I rate it in the must buy category.

*****

One of the blessings, and to some extent curses, of human existence is its ever-changing nature. We have come a long way from primitive existence when kinship was the most influential factor in the development of society. Even today human relations form the bedrock of society but the nature of these equations has undergone a change.

This volume is a collection of essays contributed by eminent scholars from such diverse fields as law, education, trade and labour. Its theme was formulated at a conference on “Changing state and market influences on gender, family and kin relations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia”.

The authors try to contextualise the various social shifts in these regions within the parameters of global restructuring, especially in the past few decades. During this period social, political, economic and cultural changes have opened up new vistas for economic and social progress, bringing unanticipated conflicts and opportunities in their wake.

The impact has been wide-ranging and profound. Previously undefined life phases like puberty and old age, and new seemingly permanent, social categories like economically independent single women/mothers, etc. are the direct consequence of these transformations.

The family as a unit is feeling the impact of such social restructuring. In fact there is a dichotomy in the manner in which family as a social unit is viewed. Some depict it as a dungeon that oppresses the womankind, while others look upon it as an irreplaceable means of providing social, material and emotional security for the vulnerable. There is truth in both viewpoints.

The authors feel that constant negotiations are held within the family to re-evaluate and update various equations within the family. Thus the changing gender and kin relationships are viewed as a dynamic concept. Students of sociology will find this book of particular interest.

*****

This is a much acclaimed book. Despite his political leanings Arun Shourie is a force to reckon with in the world of letters, that Mangalwadi pitted his wits against him, and succeeded in scoring a few points is something to be applauded. Not that Mangalwadi’s credentials as a thinker are something to scoff at — winner of the Bhimrao Ambedkar National Service Award, Vishal Mangalwadi has studied in secular universities, Hindu ashrams and in L’Abri Fellowship.

Later on, he and his wife Ruth founded an Association for Comprehensive Rural Assistance to serve India’s poor. Personally I feel that an intellectual should be above all prejudices, political, ideological, caste or otherwise. But perhaps the time for establishing such Utopia has not yet arrived.

Referring to his son’s handicap Shourie said he tried to seek the explanation for suffering in the scriptures of all creeds. In response the author gives the theories expounded by different schools of thought. Zen Buddhism treats suffering as illusion; a Naturalist, a moralist or atheist, will put forward mechanist or physical explanations for suffering; the Hindu the Karmic theory, which incidentally,the author debunks; the Buddhist world of metaphysical suffering; the Islamic viewpoint of suffering being God’s will; and the Christian stance of abnormal suffering.

The author dwells on different prejudices and accusations against Christian missionaries. For want of space it is impossible to deal with them threadbare here. We must not forget that Christianity had come to India much before it reached the West. And among the first converts to this new religion were the Namboodiri Brahmins of Kerala.

Yet, despite its presence of about 1600 years in India we still regard it as a foreign religion! Suffice it to say, if fanatical uttering of any denomination sways you, take immediate corrective action by reading books of this kind to preserve your sanity. Our world is too small, and the country only a minuscule part of it, to be able to accommodate the ever expanding demon of hatred. Once Radhakrishnan observed, “Man is still groping for a more meaningful and synthetic view of life and human destiny.” May that quest end soon, and fruitfully too.

Endless clash of the old & the new

THIS is a compilation of papers presented at a three-day seminar organised by the department of political science, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, on causes of discontent and social conflicts in South Asian countries. The book covers important aspects like societal conflict in different countries, theory and practice of liberal democracy, economy, gender issue, etc.

Bhupinder Brar and Gurbhagat Singh agree that liberal democracy has largely failed in South Asia but the diagnoses they offer radically differ. While Brar thinks that it is the pull of diverse local communities and ethnic groups which has inhibited the growth of nation-states in South Asia, for Gurbhagat Singh it is the homogenising tendency of the state at the cost of the aspirations of divergent communities which unleashes tension and conflict. The difference emanates from the clash between modernist and post-modernist standpoints.

While analysing the causes of ethnic conflict in South Asian states, B.C. Upreti points out that all states except the Maldives are multi-ethnic societies and ethnic conflicts have regional and extra-regional linkages. Under-privileged ethnic groups start demanding a greater share in the national resources and this generates conflict. Gurnam Singh’s piece, “Religion, ethnicity and nation-building in Pakistan” puts the problem in its correct perspective. The ruling elites in the Third World countries tend to homogenise society and centralise power around dominant ethnic groups. Modernisation intensifies competition for resources, pushing religion as cemcnting force into the background. The break-up of Pakistan in 1971 has to be seen in this light.

The section on economy is exceptionally strong, marked by plentiful use of data and perceptive analysis. These days champions of free market are on the ascendancy and they hawk globalisation and liberalisation as a panacea of all social ills in the Third World. There is much myth-making in the process. Some of the contributors to the section have successfully exploded several such myths.

Satish Kumar Sharma conclusively establishes that the Third World countries are losers in this game. Foreign direct investment has largely bypassed the developing countries and the already developed parts of the world like North America, Europe and Japan have grabbed a major part of it. This is not to argue that a highly controlled economy with many mindless controls is the answer, but free market economy is neither free nor friendly to the mass of people and state intervention is inevitable if their legitimate interests are to be protected. K.K. Kaushik has rightly argued in his piece that the structural adjustment is likely to create food security problem by making food costly for the working people.

The fast economic growth in South-East Asian countries is often projected as a miracle of free economy and globalisation. Lakhwinder Singh has convincingly argued that it is the expansion of human capabilities by spending liberally on education, health care, old age secutiry, etc. which is responsible for high economic growth in these countries. Thus, the reasons are internal, rather than global.

Nirmal S. Azad rightly argues that the market size has expanded in the wake of liberalisation but the benefit has not trickled down to the common man in the absence of fundamental economic transformation. Jaswinder Singh Brar points to the danger of commodification of education, especially at the higher level, when the state is abdicating its role by laying emphasis on self-financing of education.

The section on India and the states is quite exhaustive but barring a piece or two, it is poor in terms of content. While Raghvendra Tanwar’s piece succinctly deals with the agony of Punjab in thewake of partition, G.S. Dhillon’s is a typical litany of Sikh complaints about the betrayal by the British and the “Hindu” Congress. Tanwar believes that the British did contribute to kindle communal passion but it was primarily the failure of the Indian political parties, which led to the holocaust.

Dhillon’s attempt to locate material interests in the matrix of religious denominations like Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, etc. does not stand critical scrutiny. One may talk of Hindu interests, represented by the Congress earlier as thought by Dhillon and now by the Hindutava brigade. This could be true only if the Hindu community were a monolithic entity. This kind of view is not only facile but also illogical. Every community is highly stratified and fragmented and the attempt to treat it as a single unified whole stems from the strategy of the dominant elites to mobilise others in the name of common interests.

Mahendra Prasad Singh in his paper traces the experiment of coalition/minority governments in the country till June, 1997, and they fell “less due to unbridled individual ambitions and more for policy differences and poor inter-party co-ordination.” What were the policy differences he does not explain. He concludes that it would be premature to draw any definitive conclusion about the experience of coalition governments. What were the changes at the ground level that made the coalition experiment inevitable? How did the Congress lose its political hegemony, throwing up new political forces? What changes took place in its support base and why? Without answering such questions the phenomenon of coalition government cannot be understood. Leave alone answering these questions, there is no attempt even to raise them. Mere description of the coalition phenomenon in its chronological order does not add to our understanding. This paper by a senior professor of political science in a premier university like the University of Delhi shows how pathetic is the condition of this discipline in our seats of higher education.

There are several pieces on J&K but one by Rekha Chaudhary deserves notice. The gains of the regional autonomy have been largely appropriated by the Kashmir valley. The other regions, Jammu and Ladakh, have been deprived of their legitimate share. And the sense of deprivation has led to the demand for autonomy of these parts. But in reality it is a fight among the elites of the three regions for a greater share in the spoils system.

The only paper on Haryana by Ranbir Singh in this longish sectionanalyses Bansi Lal’s leadership style in the framework of Morris-Jones’ three idioms of politics in India — the traditional idiom, thesaintly idiom and the modern idiom. Ranbir Singh is an astutc observer of Haryana politics and his evaluation of Bansi Lal’s leadership style is quite interesting.

In the opinion of this reviewer, however, it is difficult to fit Bansi Lal, or, for that matter any other Lal in this land of Aya Rams and Gaya Rams, into any kind of stereotype. They use all kinds of idioms at different times to suit their interests but they still remain the same — self-seeking paranoids.

After plodding through the difficult terrain of some Indian states, the gender zone comes as a whiff of soothing air. All the three contributors in this section have argued the case with firmness of conviction and clarity of mind. Rajinder Kaur paints a grim picture of woman’s place in society at the global level, especially in the developing countries. But fortunately, there is a paradigm shift on gender question from “welfare to empowerment”.

Reicha Tanwar in her study of women in Haryana stresses the need for economic empowerment of women, as political empowerment in the form of greater presence of women in elected bodies is not enough. She makes a valuable point that modernisation and mechanisation of agriculture has diminished job opportunities for women of poor and landless families.

Kanwaljit Kaur Gill has focussed on the glaring sex discrimination in South Asia in the matter of sex ratio, life expectancy at birth and other important indicators of human development

Jaidev’s paper on Mahesweta, a well-known writer and a social activist among tribals, is a fitting finale to this elaborate exercise. He analyses her novella “Dhauloti” as a microcosm of the life of bonded labourers in India. The life of Dhauloti, the protagonist of the story, as “bandhua randi” in a brothel run by a Brahmin, is a parable of post-colonial India which is nothing but a sea of endless misery and agony for those who live on the margin of society. Jaidev’s is a moving piece and those who are not familiar with the writings of Mahesweta would like to read her after going through this piece.

The book under review is a testimony to the fact that a lot of useful work can be done in peripheral academic centres at far flung places like Shimla provided there are some committed individuals to undertake it. To organise a seminar of this dimension and then to arrange the publication of its proceedings in a book form is a stupendous task. Gopal Singh, as an organiser of the seminar and the editor of the book under review, has done a commendable job.